Who, what, when, where and why

16.02.2016

Emma Van Sant

Emma received her bachelor's degree in International Business and Marketing from the University of South Carolina. Before becoming Communications Manager at Sourcefabric, she worked at an environmentally conscious multinational innovation company headquartered in the USA. She has worked with large corporations and small non-profits in the past. Emma has been passionate about travel from a young age and has lived in Dubai, El Salvador, Michigan and Prague, among others.

Broadcast and Podcast in one place

Podcasting is the new blogging...what are you waiting for? | Photo by: Patrick Breitenbach (CC BY 1.0)¶

Open to anyone with access to a microphone, laptop and web server, podcasts are a wide-open medium. Their spike in popularity feels similar to the boom of blogging we experienced back in 2005. There was a significant amount of hype and buzz about the way blogs would change the internet. A bit of an overstatement? Perhaps. But blogs did and still do occupy a powerful space in the world of content consumption. Will this resurgence in podcasting popularity last? We can’t say...but they are here for now and provide a lot of untapped potential to reach out to listeners worldwide.

Podcasting vs traditional radio

So, what’s a podcast and how is it actually different than traditional radio broadcasting? Here’s a short recap. Podcasts are available for download on-demand over the internet. They are one of the best ways to reach listeners who can’t make it to a regularly scheduled broadcast and can be easily download and saved for on-the-go listening, or replayed and paused whenever needed. Listeners can subscribe to a podcast feed and automatically get access to the latest episodes. Low production costs mixed with high listener engagement, podcasts are a good fit for our increasingly mobile and on-demand media world. On top of this, podcasts are very attractive to advertisers.

When blogging became popular, a host of sites and publishing platforms popped up to serve the needs of those interested in this medium. We are at the start of a similar cycle for podcasting as there are not that many platforms out there yet that meet those same needs for podcasters. There are few that can accommodate both professional level of podcast production and simultaneously offer an option to new and amateur podcast producers.

Podcasts in Airtime take some of the work out of running your station by automating a number of activities such as auto fetching all new podcasts based on the RSS URL you added.

Airtime's built-in podcast feed helps you reach your listeners better. After uploading a full-length radio show to your station, you can easily publish it to your podcast feed and SoundCloud in only two clicks.

The best part? Your podcast feed can be browsed, played, and subscribed to right from your Radio Page.

Podcast ingest

Airtime Pro can now subscribe to your favorite podcast feeds and automatically download new episodes into your track library, bringing the best radio content from the web directly to your station. Just grab the RSS feed from the podcast of your choice and Airtime will pull that list directly into your station. This powerful feature can save you time by aggregating and importing tracks for you.

Station-to-Station Sharing

Now that Airtime Pro can import and publish podcast episodes, you can easily share radio programs with partner stations by publishing them to your podcast. If you’d prefer to share only with other stations and not your listeners, you can do that by toggling your Podcast Visibility to Private and sharing the secret link only with those stations.

The podcast feed built into Airtime Pro can be used as a simple way to distribute radio programs with partner stations. Anything you upload to Airtime Pro can be published to your podcast feed, so this will work if you’re uploading full radio programs you’ve already stitched together into single tracks, such as interviews, or other content you’d like to share such as advertisements or jingles. Since Airtime Pro can also subscribe to podcasts, what you’ll do is get your partner stations to subscribe to your podcast, who will then be able to download anything you publish to your podcast feed. By having stations subscribe to each other's’ podcasts, you can easy build up a radio network with shared content to help fill out your broadcast schedules.